Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was a Native Americanpoet, literary critic, lesbian activist,[1] and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Native American, and Arab-American descent, she identified with the Laguna Pueblo of her childhood years, the culture in which she had grown up. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction and poetry, and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works, and wrote two biographies of Native American women.

In addition to her literary work, in 1986 she published a major study on the role of women in American Indian traditions,[2] arguing that Europeans had de-emphasized the role of women in their accounts of native life because of their own patriarchal societies. It stimulated other scholarly work by feminist and Native American writers.

Her father, E. Lee Francis, owned a local store, the Cubero Trading Company, and later served as the lieutenant governor of New Mexico from 1967 to 1970.[4] Her brother, Lee Francis, was a Laguna Pueblo-Anishinaabe poet, storyteller and educator.

Allen received a BA and MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon.[4] She earned a PhD at the University of New Mexico, where she worked as a professor and began research on tribal religions. Allen also worked as a professor at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley before joining the UCLA Indian Center in the late 1980s.[5] As a student at the University of New Mexico, she reached out to a poetry professor, Robert Creeley, for poetic advice. He directed her to the work of Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov, who all had strong influences on her work. Later, while a student at University of Oregon she had Ralph Salisbury as a poetry professor, who is of a Cherokee tribe, and also had a heavy influence on Paula Gunn Allen.[6]

Based on her own experiences and her study of Native American cultures, Paula Gunn Allen wrote The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986). This groundbreaking work argued that the dominant cultural view of Native American societies was biased and that European explorers and colonizers understood Native Peoples through the patriarchal lens. Gunn described the central role women played in many Native American cultures, including roles in political leadership, which were either downplayed or missed entirely by explorers and scholars from male-dominated European cultures. Allen argued that most Native Americans at the time of European contact were matrifocal and egalitarian with only a small percentage reflecting the European patriarchal pattern.[7]

Her novel, The Woman Who Owned The Shadows (1983), features the woman Ephanie Atencio, the mixed-blood daughter of a mixed-blood mother who struggles with social exclusion and the obliteration of self.[13]

As a poet, Allen published a collection of more than 30 years of work: Life Is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962-1995, judged to be her most successful. Allen's work is often categorized as belonging to the Native American Renaissance, but the author rejects the label.[5]